44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 6, 2023 11:00AM
- Feb/6/23 3:41:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this motion does raise an issue that is of concern to Greens. Contracting out is always a subject of concern. The federal civil service needs to have a robust capacity for non-partisan policy advice. Contracting out so very much to one specific consulting firm raises concerns for us as well. As noted by the hon. parliamentary secretary, this is not the first time. The Conservatives also contracted out to McKinsey.
There are a lot of issues, and we want to continue to seek out why certain firms have special access. I just want to ensure that the Conservatives know that Greens will continue to press for a full investigation of the SNC-Lavalin affair, which was dropped without answers.
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- Feb/6/23 3:45:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan for sharing his time with me.
Today we are debating concurrence in the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. The motion asks that the Auditor General be called upon to conduct, as soon as possible, a performance and value-for-money audit of the contracts awarded to McKinsey & Company since January 1, 2011, by any department, agency or Crown corporation.
How did it come to this? Right now, millions of Canadians are struggling financially. The cost of living has gone up. Everything is expensive. People do not have enough money. Meanwhile, contracts are going to multinational corporations like McKinsey.
Since 2016, McKinsey has been awarded over $120 million worth of contracts for studies and proposals on matters relating to immigration, national defence, the Canada Border Services Agency and public services. It has received millions of dollars to make recommendations. However, we cannot get any information about the real purpose of the studies that were commissioned.
The Prime Minister is not saying a word. We are being told that two ministers, the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Public Services and Procurement, are going to get answers. The members opposite must think we are not very bright.
We all know nobody wants to say it even though everybody knows it. That is the crux of the problem with the McKinsey file right now. There is deep secrecy around what the firm has done for Canada.
Our motion asks for an audit dating back to 2011, when we were in power, because we know that we have nothing to hide. The contracts awarded back then were for consulting services on very specific topics. The value of the contracts was not exorbitant. In 2014 and 2015, no contracts were awarded. All of a sudden, in 2016, the contracts ballooned. It was as though, suddenly, no one in the departments knew what to do. Suddenly, no one knew what to do about national defence, immigration and border services, so contracts worth tens of millions of dollars had to be awarded to McKinsey to get the answers. I will repeat once again that we have not been able to determine what was proposed.
This is the eighth year of a government that has been implicated in a number of conflicts of interest. We went through the SNC-Lavalin affair. On several separate occasions, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner prepared reports on the Prime Minister. Today, we are again in a situation where it is abundantly clear that there is some type of conflict of interest.
Dominic Barton was the global managing director at McKinsey when the Liberal government took power in 2015. He defended himself in committee by saying that he had not done anything, that he was not aware of anything and that he did not know anything.
In one of the questions that I asked him before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, I told him that he was fascinating. In looking at him, I realized that he has a real talent for not answering questions and for pretending that this is not happening and that it is all made up. However, the facts speak for themselves. As soon as the government took power, it started following Mr. Barton's advice. He told the government to hire his firm so that it could give the government the tools it needed to know what to do, because the government did not know what to do.
That is where we are at now. There is even an ethical issue here. That being said, our motion has one main objective. We want the Auditor General, an independent officer of Parliament, to conduct an audit and report to Parliament on what happened with the various contracts that have been awarded to McKinsey since 2011. Taxpayers are the ones footing the bill, so they have the right to know.
As I said, over the past eight years, the government has completely lost control of public finances. Everyone knows that Canada's debt has doubled. We are going to have to pay interest on the debt, which will cost $40 billion a year. We are going to have to take money that was allocated for operating expenditures and use it to pay the interest to the banks because of the $15 billion in contracts awarded to subcontractors, including McKinsey. This raises questions, and that is why the Auditor General must investigate to tell us what we got for $120 million.
Were the contracts awarded properly? Was the information necessary? Were public servants capable of answering these questions?
There are so many unanswered questions.
The Business Development Bank of Canada is another example. The government appointed a new president. The first thing she did was take $4.9 million and give it to McKinsey so they could tell her what the strategic direction of the Bank of Canada is. Internally, people saw a president come in who, instead of consulting them to develop the long-term strategic plan for the Bank of Canada, brought in McKinsey. Why?
These are the kinds of questions that need to be answered. At some point, there is a reason that it is in the news and everyone is asking questions. We know there is something wrong.
One of the problems with McKinsey is the company's history. McKinsey has been involved in a number of activities involving questionable countries, secret contracts, previous involvement with opioids, influencing pharmaceutical companies. On the one hand, McKinsey was telling pharmaceutical companies how to keep selling products and, on the other hand, advising governments to try and solve the problem. That makes no sense. This company certainly raises a lot of ethical issues.
McKinsey is also known to have worked with Chinese state-owned enterprises, including one that builds militarized islands in the South China Sea. It hosted a corporate retreat on the road to a concentration camp in China's Uighur region. It has worked with companies affiliated with the Russian state, long after the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is public, known information; however, eventually, a decision has to be made. Once the government has that information, what does it do with it? Will contracts continue to be awarded to conduct studies, provide information and tell our public service how to handle various strategic issues, such as defence or immigration? The influence of the McKinsey reports was clear, in relation to the Century Initiative, when the Minister of Immigration announced Canada's new immigration targets before Christmas, in November. The plan is to bring in 500,000 people per year starting in 2025, to increase Canada's population to 100 million by 2100. However, whenever we ask questions, the answers come from elsewhere, because the minister never even bothered to absorb the information himself. People come and give numbers, without considering the francophonie, for example, or our accommodation capacity. We are talking about 12 million people in greater Montreal; I will give the leader of the Bloc Québécois credit for talking about this. As a result, eventually, people start to wonder where this information is coming from and how we got to the point where our own government essentially has no idea what to do and turns to McKinsey for answers. It simply executes the plan only to realize later that it does not work.
Our motion is simple. We hope the government will support it and understand that we need the Auditor General of Canada to get to the bottom of all this so we can find out what really happened, especially considering the tough economic times we are in. Canadian taxpayers want the government to manage their money properly. All we have been seeing for the past eight years is waste.
Once again, we are seeing the government award contracts to its friends for advice about things that should cost a lot less; I could call them something other than contracts, but I will refrain. We need to know what the offer was, the bid, so we can see if it makes sense and move forward. That is the point of consultants. If they have good ideas, we use those ideas. However, when we do not know what the idea is and then the government comes out with some kind of vague policy, obviously there is something fishy going on.
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- Feb/6/23 4:43:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague hit the nail on the head. This goes beyond procurement. This is about confidence in government, in the government's integrity. That is a problem. I would actually take this one step further than my colleague.
Many consulting firms do business with the Government of Canada. People have mentioned Deloitte and KPMG. These two firms sell advice. McKinsey sells influence. That is not the same thing. There should be stricter rules governing influence.
I think it is currently an open bar kind of situation. Nothing is being done to find out what McKinsey does, what it has contributed, how much it cost and why it could not have been done some other way. There is zero accountability at the moment. The point is that they are selling influence, not advice.
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- Feb/6/23 5:20:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the questions and comments he has made in a very scintillating speech.
However, because he is asking the opposition this question rather than the government, I really want to ask him something. When the member asks about expanding this to include the other consulting firms that are involved here, I think the answer from the opposition side is that the Canadian government has spent so much since the Liberal government has been in power, we would look at the expansion of how much it has spent on consulting and where the money went. Especially, we would look at where money has been spent egregiously by the government with no result.
That would be an entertaining study, but it would take years. Right now we have one consulting firm, and the government spent 50 times more on it than it did in the entire term of the last government. We need to say that is an egregious expansion to one firm with well-connected friends. Could we drill into this and get it checked out very quickly? Would the member agree with that?
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- Feb/6/23 5:47:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have to say to my colleague from Kingston and the Islands that, in all my time in the House of Commons, that is the best speech I have heard him give. Thank you for that. Thank you for supporting the motion we are putting forward here, in getting exposure on these contracts in particular, and thank you for not bending to opening this up so that we are boiling the ocean, as people used to say in consulting work, where we are going to have to look at things that will take us years to look at. This is one specific contract.
I will ask the member if he will actually commit to doing this as efficaciously and quickly as possible, to get this done within the next few weeks so that we can totally expose the amount that McKinsey has taken from this government and what results the government has actually gotten from that $100 million-plus of advice over the last handful of years.
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- Feb/6/23 5:52:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in the vein of reasonableness, I have a question for my colleague. I will agree with my friend from Calgary Centre that that was probably one of our Liberal colleague's best speeches. However, I do not think we have decreased the size of the public service. I think it has gone up by about 30%. Also, third party contracts have gone up by 30% to 35%.
With the public service being increased and the number of third party contracts being increased for consulting, does he believe Canadians are getting fair value for their dollar? If they are paying more, are they getting better services?
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- Feb/6/23 6:22:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as a relatively new member of the government operations committee, I know we have an outsourcing study, which is continuing. I certainly look forward to continuing to evaluate many of the other outside companies that provide consulting to the government.
I think we are here because the Canadian public, and even the media in this country, turned Canadians and the official opposition onto what was going on in the House and with the government in relation to the unique relationship between McKinsey & Company and the government. Certainly, while I think the points made are very important, our leader has said that he looks forward to empowering the public service once again by reducing the use of consultants.
I really think it was the Canadian people who drove us to push on the McKinsey file.
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- Feb/6/23 6:23:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I commend my colleague for her speech.
The Bloc Québécois fully supports complete transparency in federal public spending. As we know, the Senate of France conducted a study on the growing influence of consulting firms' relationships with various governments around the world and released a report containing recommendations. The report recommends more transparency, no secrecy, meaningful openness about all contracts, and accountability. Consulting firms are not accountable at this time.
I would like to know what my colleague thinks of those recommendations.
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